Wedding day: Terry Capes, 22, on a stretcher, with wife Pat in 1951. She didn't tell him doctors thought he had only six months to live due to his tuberculosis...

Celebrating: Terry and Pat Capes, celebrating their 60th diamond wedding anniversary yesterday at home in York

Recalling how the disease struck him, Mr Capes, 82, explained: ‘I contracted TB in January 1949. I just thought I had a dose of the flu as I was coughing all the time, but I went to the GP who told me the bad news.

‘It took me three-and-a-half years to get out of bed, I just felt rotten. My legs turned to jelly and I couldn’t stand, but I still didn’t know how ill I was.

‘I was even sent home at one point, I was told it was to prepare for an operation. But in reality I was being sent home because they didn’t think I was going to make it.

‘Pat and I were determined to get married. Everything had been out of our control.

'Pat contracted it a year after I did and we were being pushed about by doctors and nurses, so we decided to take control for once and get married regardless.

‘On the day itself I had a jacket, shirt, tie and carnation on my top half, but pyjama bottoms on my bottom half and a hot-water bottle with me, hidden by a bed sheet.’

‘On the [wedding] day itself I had a jacket, shirt, tie and carnation on my top
half, but pyjama bottoms on my bottom half and a hot-water bottle with
me, hidden by a bed sheet’

A relative who was an ambulance driver borrowed a vehicle to take the 22-year-old to church in Wadebridge, Cornwall, in January 1951.

He was placed on a trestle to say his vows and then carried back out.

Mr Capes added: ‘We had a quick reception at home but it didn’t last for long because I had to be taken back to the hospital, and so did Pat. Some wedding night that was.’

Mrs Capes, an 83-year-old former shop worker, who had developed a less serious strain of TB, said: ‘It was a very, very unusual wedding but we wanted to do it.

‘We didn’t want Terry to know how ill he was and that the doctor had said he only had six months to live. We didn’t want the prediction to come true. He was young and healthy and we wanted to believe he could beat it – and he did.’

Mr Capes, a teacher, was bed- bound for a further two years. He finally recovered in 1953, when they moved to Birmingham, then Canada.

They returned to the UK and settled in York in 1970 and have lived there ever since.

The couple, who now have two great-grandchildren, met by chance in 1948.

Mr Capes recalled how he was driving a neighbour from hospital – and fell for her daughter.

‘I can still remember the first moment I saw her, I was smitten immediately. I even angled the car mirror so I could take a look at her. She was a smasher.’

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TB sufferer celebrates diamond wedding after being given 6 months to live... in 1951